


If You are the Wine I’m the Headache You Part With

by dilapidatedcorvid



Series: All of the Canyons in My Mind [3]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Implied Sexual Content, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, enough metaphors to put the damn Noniad to shame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:35:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26490496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid
Summary: You see, Camilla is like bone. Gorgeous bone, make no mistake—graceful as the symmetry of the sphenoid, precise as the styloid process, strong as the mandible—but beyond the hard, smooth surface lies a softness that is inexplicably delightful. It’s the kind of thing you might bring out your best cleaver for, to split the bone clean in half to reveal the hard, spongy marrow that gives under your fingers when you press. The kind of thing where, if you tended to it patiently under flame, you might emerge with a buttery sort of thing that you might take you smallest, most delicate spoon to and scoop out as if it was gelato di limone, to swirl around your tongue and drink in the sweet, nutty flavours a little at a time.But Camilla is bone because bone does not crack easily and she does not give easily, but you aren’t easy either and you’ll have what you want. And Undying King above, you want her.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius
Series: All of the Canyons in My Mind [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915975
Comments: 11
Kudos: 39





	If You are the Wine I’m the Headache You Part With

“If you could be any bird, what would it be?”

It’s a silly question Babs asks you one day when you are young—no older than 13 Earth years—when you sit in the gardens. He refuses to sit for fear of dirtying his new cavalier’s trousers. They look ridiculous on him, you think. Ianthe is the one who says it, and you sneak her a sly grin when Babs’ face flushes red and he stammers in indignation.

“I think I’d be a dove,” you say airily, tilting your face towards the sun. “I’d be beautiful and loved.” You run your hands over the tops of flowers and think about how you’d make Babs’ trousers look so much better if you wore them.

Babs sneers. “They used to kill doves as sacrifice, you know, Princess?” He turns to Ianthe. “How about you?”

Ianthe looks at the flowers in contemplation, then speaks. “I would be a goshawk.”

“What’s that? Like a bird-of-prey?” Babs never had a knack for schooling outside of the blade. “Why would you want to be that?”

Ianthe doesn’t look up from the flower. Beside the pallor of her skin, the wilted petals look vibrant. “Because they kill other birds to eat.”

You carry the memory with you in nicknames. She is your goshawk, you are her dove. You never find out what bird Babs would want to be. A part of you wishes you had asked when Ianthe pierces him through with his rapier, but he is dead and gone, and soon, Ianthe is gone too.

* * *

You were taught early in school that there is no sound in space. That it is a vacuum, that there is no medium for sound waves to travel through, that the empty spaces between planets and stars are filled with no sound at all. You did not pay half the attention they would have demanded of you—the Crown Princess has no need of this information and if it weren’t for the fact that your sister sat in rapt attention, you would have whisked her away to play with you out by the terraces—but you do remember that they did not tell you that the darkness of the void sounds like a scream at a frequency that is too high for your human ears to detect, the kind that makes blood drip out your nostrils and your head throb and your nights sleepless.

There had never been a moment of silence in your life on Ida. If it was not the chorus of voices at a ball, then it was one of the thousands constantly seeking your attention, then it was the sound of music that played in the palace halls at all hours of the day, then it was Ianthe leaning over to whisper something utterly inappropriate for her station into your ear and the slight snort from your lips as you try not to smile.

Everything on Ida was noisy. The silence of space is louder.

And the thing with Camilla is that she does nothing to abate the silence. And you hate that. You can understand that she is not a woman of many words. That, you can respect; you speak enough for the both of you anyways. But she only speaks when she needs to, only acts when she needs to, the very definition of practicality and conservation. Which would be fine if it didn’t mean that more often than not, you are left to stew in your own thoughts, accompanied only by the low thrumming of the ship’s engine.

But when Camilla speaks, it’s with her warm, low, intoxicating voice, like the kind of full-bodied red wine you swirl in a glass under your nose after dinner and the kind that sings in your blood after the third glass and emboldens you to do foolish things—foolish, foolish things you would never do otherwise. But you have always been a fool for people who say your name like that, like you are real and alive, not just some beautiful token of royalty draped in gauzy fabrics. It feels like a tornado ripping at your soul and scattering all the bitterness in your being to the four corners of the sprawling darkness surrounding you.

Despite it all, it’s still a rare thing. You wonder if this is her natural disposition and what you saw of her banter with Palamedes was just the sum of years of friendship and closeness, or if this is Camilla in mourning. Sometimes when you look over from the navigator’s seat, her lips aren’t set in a hard line like they usually are. Sometimes when you look over from the navigator’s seat, she’s looking at you with raptor eyes, her lips slightly parted like she has something to say, like she has words she deigns to grace your ears with. And then inevitably she swallows and turns her face back into the vast expanse of space around you, setting aside the surgeon’s scalpel of a tongue. She never says what she intended to say.

So you don’t say what you intended to say either.

You don’t know where you’re going, exactly. You’re following the newest of the Emperor’s Hand as she gallivants across the universe leaving a trail of dead planets in her wake. She moves quickly, a shadow dancing in the reflection of an oil slick. The pursuit is long and the nights longer. It’s the monotony of the silence, the tedium of being in the same place for days on end, the invariability in the lack of salient things to look at, variation in colour.

And the thing with Camilla is that she is all muted colours. She is placid and drab and utterly boring at first glance; her clothes are grey, her eyes are the kind of dark where you can’t hazard a guess what colour they might be if you were to pass by a star—it’s too dark out here in the far reaches of the galaxy to know—and her skin is a sort of soft, warm brown of sard. She’s right at home here in the shuttle of burnished metal, of gunmetal grey-rimmed panels, of slate-coloured seats. You would not have spared her a second glance as you wouldn’t for any other if you saw her on the streets, but you have had the time to look deeper in the late hours of the night when she is asleep and you are not, and your eyes commit the shape of her nose and the shell of her ear to memory. She is extraordinary disguised to look ordinary, a deadly force of nature carefully restrained in an unremarkable mortal vessel, master craftsmanship hidden behind a simple watch face.

And you are violet like the expanse of the cosmos and you are golden like the sun of Dominicus, and you do not belong here in this capsule. Nothing here is built for you. The hatches on the shuttle are too small and you have to duck when you pass into the hold. There is a small bathroom outfitted with only the meager necessities and the sonic only works half of the time anyway. There is one bed—Judith sleeps in the hold because neither you nor Camilla can afford to lose sleep over what a prisoner of war might do when neither of you are conscious to the world—and your heels hang over the end, Camilla’s torso pressed flush to the front of yours. The alternative is that someone sleeps in the cockpit but between navigation and managing your prisoner, neither of you will risk a night of poor rest.

You think that maybe it’s good for her too. That you both sleep better like this. Ianthe is taller but the warmth of skin against yours is comfort you allow yourself to indulge in and you see the tension leave Camilla’s shoulders when your arm drapes carefully over her waist. You don’t ask.

You don’t ask when she turns around in your arms and startles you, you who thought she was asleep, you who are captivated by eyes dark like the space you drift through and twice as deep.

“You’re not sleeping,” she says in her voice of thick, dark honey. The waxy comb sticks to your molars when you chew, rolling the words around your mouth with your tongue like sweet, sticky candy.

You respond in kind. “No, I’m not sleeping.”

She looks at you and you are dissected under her gaze, your thoughts turned into coronal slices pressed against slides of glass and carefully examined under microscope eyes. “You’re thinking of her,” she says.

You nod. When are you not thinking of your necromancer? When is she never thinking of hers? It warms you somehow that this is important enough to her to speak. You don’t speak of your pain and she doesn’t speak of hers but you know they are one and the same. You are a dove—breast stained red with the hue of its blood—run through by the arrow of Ianthe’s betrayal, and she is Athena’s owl—a goddess of war in her quest for wisdom—spurred by the grief like a hood over her eyes.

You kiss her.

It’s not the first time you have, and it certainly won’t be the last. Yet, her lips still against yours, as if in a rare moment of surprise, and then she pushes you onto your back and kisses you back.

Camilla kisses as she fights—you had dragged yourself to the overlook at Canaan House and laid witness to a clash of the kind that would find a home in the epics lining your childhood bedroom shelves—she is lethal in her precision, deadly in her deliberateness. Her hands slip under the loose material of the shirt you wear to bed and her fingers splay over your ribs where you’re soft and strong and she can feel your every breath.

“Camilla,” you breathe between kisses, tilting your hips up to press against hers.

Her hands are calloused at the fingertips, along the side of the right middle finger, at the palm. The roughened skin drags along yours and you shiver. They are the hands of a woman who has devoted her life to the pen and to the sword, to the pursuit of knowledge to the edges of the known universe. These are the hands that have gently teased open a million envelopes and carefully distilled its secrets into an elixir she writes the composition of into the book of flimsy she keeps in her bag beside the pouch of bones, all in the same way she teases your thighs apart, reads the minute twitches of your muscles—the betrayals by your body—and files them away for later.

And the thing with Camilla is that she’s like an oyster, shell tight, unwilling to give up its secrets, its treasures. But everything inside an oyster is worth it. The flesh, the salty liquor, the pearls. It’s worth the silt and muck that coats hands and feet, it’s worth the knife that cuts when it slips on shell, it’s worth the challenge. Camilla holds secrets like she holds her injured hand to her chest, guarded, detached. She’s unyielding when her fingers closes over a nugget of information she wishes to keep from you, and plead and prod as you may, as much as you try your charms against her, she is stoic and steadfast and sometimes suffers you the indignation of smiling and patting your head before moving on. It’s the most detestable thing and you crave to claw your fingers into her ribs and peel her open to reveal her beating heart and press your ear to it that you might hear its secrets. How Third of you.

You see, Camilla is like bone. Gorgeous bone, make no mistake—graceful as the symmetry of the sphenoid, precise as the styloid process, strong as the mandible—but beyond the hard, smooth surface lies a softness that is inexplicably delightful. It’s the kind of thing you might bring out your best cleaver for, to split the bone clean in half to reveal the hard, spongy marrow that gives under your fingers when you press. The kind of thing where, if you tended to it patiently under flame, you might emerge with a buttery sort of thing that you might take you smallest, most delicate spoon to and scoop out as if it was gelato di limone, to swirl around your tongue and drink in the sweet, nutty flavours a little at a time.

But Camilla is bone because bone does not crack easily and she does not give easily, but you aren’t easy either and you’ll have what you want. And Undying King above, you want her.

You press your thigh between her legs and she pushes her hand past your waistband and this is a waltz you have done too many times on this bed. You know the steps to this dance by now. Your hand on her shoulder, the other, fingers intertwined, the back of your hand pressed against the scratchy sheets, her hand guiding you firm and slow. You find no mercy in the press of her fingers inside you and you take it like atonement.

You press your nose into the junction of her neck and shoulder, and then your teeth. She tastes like salt and stale shuttle air and you bite until she hisses, until you taste a burst of blood against the backs of your upper incisors. She curls her fingers viciously—retribution—and you throw yourselves into the whirlpool, a desperate clawing for the eye of the storm.

Here, you are an apostate. Your riches and glory go up in smoke—a burnt sacrifice, its aroma pleasing to the gods—and you salt the soil of your birthright from a shuttle hurtling away from the only home you have ever known. And here in Camilla’s arms, you swear your fealty to her with strangled voice, your sanguine-smeared lips pressed against hers.

She bleeds and you drip and you both break in each other’s wretched grasps—crumbling towers, eroded and weak, disintegrating into dust as you hit the water below the cliffs you plummet down from. Your mouth is bloodied, your core is sore in a way that rides the line of pain and pleasure, your hand touches Camilla’s shoulder where she was impaled, and she flinches.

And Camilla is silent, is colourless, is filled with secrets, a puzzle left before your idle hands, and you want nothing more than to make her sigh in ecstasy, look at you with brilliant eyes, crack her open and hear the tales that thread through her musculature.

You have no love for her. She is made of multitudes, a being made of fractals you cannot tease apart, and you fear that if you peer too deep, that perhaps the pattern would brand itself into your eyes until you cannot even close your eyes without seeing the beautiful spirals seared into the backs of your eyelids. You have never known how to love someone but to consume them utterly and spit them back out, used and spent.

She has no love for you. You are a cog in her machinations as she is a piece to your puzzle and you are only as good for each other as you can give. There is a surprising amount of blood she has squeezed from this rock. You have seen the way she looks at one she loves. The way she looks at you is not cherishing, but carefully concealed contrition.

And you don’t blame her at all.

You let go of her and she pushes herself onto her feet, padding towards the bare bathroom. You hear the sonic turn on.

You lay on your back, licking the blood from your lips, splaying your limbs out on the full width of the bed while you still have it to yourself. It’s still not wide enough to accommodate your wingspan.

So instead you close your eyes and dream of flight.

**Author's Note:**

> But dilapidatedcorvid, you say, you've already done two of these, is one more surely needed? To which I respond: these two have managed to make a home in my mind and I am about to make it everyone else's problem too. When will I stop? When I run out of lyrics from this song to title these with. Once again, [@searchforthescars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars) came in clutch with helping to beta as she has done for every installation thus far and I am indebted to her generosity and expertise.
> 
> Liked it enough to get to the end notes? Drop me a kudos and maybe a comment if you're feeling saucy and so inclined!
> 
> Title from "No Maps of the Past" by The Collection
> 
> Tumblr: [frumpkinspocketdimension](https://frumpkinspocketdimension.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: SweetBabyRae#0967


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